End of Story

by A.J. Finn

Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families . . . you have no idea . . . what games goes on! Bleak House

Fog prowled the ground earlier this morning—San Francisco swirl, velvet-thick and chill—but now the last of it burns off, and the courtyard basks in light: paving stones, sundial, a chorus line of daffodils.

“Looks like you’re reading a mystery there,” he rasps. The car coasts over a pothole, shudders beneath them. She brandishes the paperback. “Agatha Christie. Murder in Mesopotamia.”

She peers past him into a stagnant tide of evening fog, lustrous as pearl in the headlights.

“Mysteries, I was saying.” Smoke chugging from his mouth, roiling in the cold air. “Lots of mysteries in San Francisco. You heard of the Zodiac?” “They never caught him.” “They never—yeah.” He scowls in the rearview. Nicky shuts up; it’s his city, his story. “He’s our Jack the Ripper. Then we got the Romance of the Skies. She was a jetliner disappeared back in the fifties. Flying to Hawaii, and she just—” A suck of his cigarette. “Gone.” A puff of smoke.

The houses loom roadside, spectral in the haze: nineteenth-century ladies, slim and prim, dressed in pastels; a Spanish-style sprawl swarming with ivy; a mock Tudor, timbers and plaster atop herringbone brickwork; two Queen Annes, wood trim lacy as a doily.

“We got mystery writers in San Francisco, too. Dashiell Hammett—he lived back there. Post Street.”

“Well. Enjoy that mystery of yours.” Moving past her in a waft of nicotine; Nicky wonders if he means the murder in Mesopotamia or the disappearance in San Francisco. As he ducks into the front seat, the car wheezes, and the cabbie with it. “Enjoy the city, too,” he calls. “Fifty square miles surrounded by reality.”

Behind her she feels the house holding its breath.

Ink sinks into stationery, indelible as a scar; email is breath on glass, an instant dissolve.

(Dear Mr. Trapp: I am in fact a woman.)

The fog ripples, parts like curtains, unveiling the house, risen above her in a great frozen wave.

The article was breathless to the point of asthma.

Her voice (“Milk or sugar?”) is quiet, as though dusty from disuse.

Diana’s accent is like fog, English and soft at the edges.

I suppose we tend to think of crime writers as would-be killers, don’t we? Murderers manqués?

I remind them that plenty of great American novels are crime stories. Lolita. Mockingbird. Native Son. Gatsby—that’s a detective novel.

“Careful in this house,” she adds. “Sound travels. No secrets.”

“En-tah.” The door all but rattles. They en-tah.

Floor-to-ceiling shelves line the walls, groaning with those six thousand books, all packed tight as teeth.

Housed within the far wall is a fireplace, flames waving, as though inviting her to kneel beside the hearth. She would ignite, she thinks; she is dry tinder.

Slowly he stands, unfolding like a switchblade every inch of his impossibly long body.

“I’M SORRY TO HAVE KEPT YOU WAITING. Rotten way to begin a story. You don’t want too much lounging around.”

He’s just a man, she remembers. A man who, as one critic remarked, wrote “the best Golden Age detective stories since the Golden Age.” A man whose books have astounded her for years.

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,”

“Please. What about Murder on the Orient Express?” She cradles her bag in her lap. “You said there shouldn’t be too much lounging around in a story. But that story’s basically just a series of interviews.”

On page 222 of my edition, St. John says that “The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier” and “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane” are the only Sherlock Holmes stories narrated by Holmes instead of Dr. Watson. Unless I’m mistaken, “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual” is also—technically—narrated by Holmes.

“Common mistake. It’s a viceroy. A mimic. It evolved to look like the monarch, which is poisonous. Although lepidopterists discovered a while back that in fact both species are poisonous.”

“Why mimic another poisonous species?” “Perhaps it doesn’t realize it’s poisonous,”

Death has come for better men. Death has come for worse. Now Death has come for me.

In you, Miss Hunter, I see the audience for the final story I will ever tell. I see someone who can tell it in kind to anybody who cares to know. I’ll be dead in three months. Come tell my story.

Somewhere outside the library, the house groans like an old man rising.

TIME IS THE BEST KILLER

“Not longer than three months, certainly. Who knows you’re here in San Francisco, by the way?” “Oh—friends. All of them. Not all of them, but—” “But enough of them.” He smiles.

“If you can find the good in half the authors you’ve written about, I hope you can find the good in me.” A grin. “And I hope you won’t have to dig too deep.”

“You and I might even solve an old mystery or two while we’re at it.”

For a mad moment, Nicky imagines herself a girl detective in the pages of a book, a creature of pulped paper and black ink. A character

Even with three months left, he’s able to conduct electricity: just sitting before her, he seemed to radiate energy, like a dying star.

Her footsteps die in the depths of the staircase.

“Welcome to San Francisco. Don’t talk to strangers,”

“We’re vegan, doll. ’S why we’re called Give Peas a Chance.” Goddammit, San Francisco.

Without a carcass to circle, the media eventually flapped away.

Outside the window, fog again blurs the air again, cars swim through it—nothing like the lava flows of taillights in New York.

nearby, Sargent’s Madame X, two bare arms and a narrow waist and no head.

“Someone very dangerous is standing right behind you.”

“This is a trick puzzle,” she explains, carefully unpicking piece after piece until the cat is disarticulated, just a scattering of whiskers and fur. “It can fit together any number of ways. But there’s only one true solution.”

She’s on loan from the prow of a Viking ship, yet she appears very slightly amused, as though she’s got a secret and it’s dirty.

“I’m also sure you’ll be exquisitely sensitive.” “Sensitive is my middle name.” “Very few people use their middle names.”

I wrote a terrible book. I won’t ask if you’ve read it. You’d be embarrassed if you hadn’t. I’d be embarrassed if you had.

Around her all is quiet. The walls say nothing to one another; the floors don’t settle. Not even the whisper of pipes. Not even the creep of a clock. A house without a voice.